The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) is a charity committed to the education and training of journalists, editors and researchers towards critical in-depth reporting and defence of the public interest.

In 2016, CIJ received funding from The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to launch a training programme in investigations for community and citizen journalism organisations. The charity would like to reapply for funding this year, but needs advice and support on how to evaluate its programme.

Using insights from economics, volunteer economist Ahmed Al-Khaja, an analyst at the National Audit Office, suggested three ways that the charity can evaluate its work: through process evaluation, economic evaluation and impact evaluation.

As the data from the CIJ’s training programme is mostly qualitative, process evaluation is likely to be the most successful form of evaluation. Economic and impact evaluation is more feasible when there are measurable outcomes and a large sample.

As well as giving recommendations on evaluation methods, Ahmed provided the charity with templates to begin collecting information to then evaluate and report back to Joseph Rowntree.

We would like to thank Ahmed Al-Khaja for his support of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

10th May 2017